r/learnprogramming • u/Suspicious-Fix-295 • 11h ago

When languages "just become about syntax"

I have seen a lot of post saying "once I learned C - all other languages just became about syntax"

Has that been true for you? Or did a different language give you the eureka moment - e.g. something like Assembly?

Or is it just a false premise at all to think "once I learn programming language X - then all other languages become **easy**"

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u/lurgi 11h ago

It's nonsense, because there are programming languages that do not work like C. Haskell and Rust are not just C with fancy syntax. Java has a whole lot of stuff going beyond what C can talk about.

It is true that once you learn one language the second language will likely be a lot easier, but not because the second language is C with a fake mustache. It's because by learning the first language you also learned how to program, and that knowledge does carry over.

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u/GlassLost 6h ago

I know rust, Java, and a bit of Haskell and I know them all in the context of C (granted for Java that means I know the jvm).

This is just a question of "how do you abstract higher level concepts to lower level ones" applied to languages and unless you want to think about assembly (I try to avoid it unless I need to vectorize something) I tend to just stop at C.

If you can't talk about what's going on in these languages in the context of C then you don't understand how the language is interacting with the hardware.

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u/kpg_on_ao3 5h ago

> If you can't talk about what's going on in these languages in the context of C then you don't understand how the language is interacting with the hardware.

Who cares, and how is this related to OP's question